Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS, FACMI, ACHIP

Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS, FACMI, ACHIP

President and Chief Executive Officer
Rhode Island Quality Institute

Associate Professor of Medical Science and Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy & Practice
Brown University

 

Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS, FACMI, ACHIP is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Rhode Island Quality Institute (RIQI), which serves as Rhode Island’s Regional Health Information Organization. He is also an Associate Professor of Medical Science and Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy & Practice at Brown University. Prior to his current role at RIQI, he was the founding director of the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics. His work is dedicated to furthering biomedical informatics educational and research agenda across the entire spectrum of biomedicine, from molecules to populations. He is a Board Member and Treasurer for the American Medical Informatics Association, as well as an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the Founding Editor-In-Chief for JAMIA Open. He was among the first cohort of individuals to achieve Diplomate status as an AMIA Certified Health Information Professional. Dr. Sarkar’s work has been funded by sources such as the National Science Foundation, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and the National Institutes of Health. He has been an author on over 145 peer-reviewed articles, which span topics from comparative genomics using phylogenetic approaches to population-level trend detection and predictive modeling in clinical and public health contexts.

Reframing Health Information Exchange as a Utility

Health data are essential to clinical decision making. Advances in electronic health record and digital health technologies have led to major advances in healthcare data interoperability. Health information exchange has correspondingly evolved to become and expectation for almost all healthcare transactions. This presentation will provide a perspective on how the electronic health record has transformed the practice of medicine and have given rise to the potential for ubiquitous access to the longitudinal medical history. The consequent advancement of health information exchange to the reframing as a health data utility will then be presented as a major feature in the future of health care.